The Miracle of Metaphor

Ron Phares

July, 26, 2009

Prayer

How strange and heavy that we are here occupying these pews, this place, and this planet, wild minds as the cosmos in process, we are the universe as dream. We are bound by its emptiness and lit by its energy Lit so as to see there are ways of seeing, ways of seeing that emptiness and that energy Ways of seeing the sky above, the earth on which we stand, water. Father. Mother. Child. We are the universe dreaming. Let it be a good dream.

Sermon

I think I’m developing a little ritual. It is self indulgent, I know, so I hope you don’t mind. But I have been, quite naturally and organically, developing a little ritual or habit that I do when I step into the pulpit. You see, the pulpit is like a circuit between the congregation and the better angels of their nature. That makes me the circuit breaker. Sometimes I worry that I might blow. Which brings me back to my ritual. Here it is; I feel like I’ve begun most of my sermons with a confession. Something about preaching makes me want to confess. It’s the same today. I am simply compelled to name my transgression with regards to this role. You see, as I sat down to write this sermon, as I put on my theological space suit, climbed into the ontological rocket chair and hit the ignition switch, I realized that I had no idea where I was going. I had, quite simply, forgotten the topic and title that I had some weeks ago given to the communications wing of this outfit.

Now, in my defense, I did recall that whatever the topic I had given, I had made it intentionally broad so as to be able to fit whichever shape the spirit moved me to take. I remembered that it had something to do with metaphor. And fear not, it most definitely will have something to do with metaphor. So my legal team says I’m in the clear, even if we do take the long way around.

And we will take the long way around, because first I want to talk a little bit about preaching. It’s this compulsion to confession that’s really got me going right now. It goes way beyond the imprecision of my memory. Right? There’s more to my sense of inauthenticity than that because its not just today. This confessional thing happens every damn time. I come up here and offer my inadequacy right off the bat. Maybe I’m just beating you to the punch, just protecting myself and it’s the preacherly equivalent of asking you if this dress makes me look fat. Maybe I am cowed at the immensity of your trust and curiosity in the face of the elusiveness of the spirit. Maybe.

I do think part of my compulsion to confession is some sort of back door approach to authority. I mean the one thing that I am an authority on, is that I am not an authority on anything. And so that is honest or at least a pass at honesty. And so now you think I’m being honest. And it’s through that honesty that you then, in spite of my disclaimer, may grant me authority. Or so I think it goes in my mind. At any rate, it is rhetorical jujitsu. It’s kind of a neat trick.

This doesn’t make it bad. Or untrue. In fact, it is not only true, but necessary in order for me to allow myself to be up here at all. The confession is born only out of the good intention to clear the air, so that you see me, or rather, the message, clearly. So that I see you clearly, so that I see myself clearly and so that I might pursue and communicate those things which I have been charged to pursue and communicate when accepting the invitation to fill this pulpit.

To put it plainly, I come up here and speak to you of things we need to consider, that I do not consider, of things we ought to do, that I do not do, of facts that I present as obvious, if ingenious, but that I had never even heard of until the night before. It’s just a role, or… more like a dream. I am, like this, my own figment. To step into this pulpit is to step into, to inhabit, my dream. It is shocking because it produces in me a feeling of discord that borders on dishonesty. But the beauty is that it forces me to face it. My dream and my being are so divergent here, but inhabit by force of commitment, the same space. Maybe there’s a place in your own life where you feel similarly. At any rate, for me, sometimes this coincidence of divergence feels like atoms splitting.

The energy released from that explosion – it has a sound. And that sound has a shape – in my mouth and in my notebook. And that shape surrounds an idea, rendered, as everything is, by metaphor. And it goes something like this: Religion is a fiction and I am a charlatan.

The word charlatan comes from the Italian word cialare, which means, “to prattle.” Huh! The more full bodied rendering of the word connotes a person, “who is being accused of resorting to pseudoscience in order to swindle his victims.” Well, I admit to not understanding half the science behind the science that I report from the pulpit. Yet, the very medium in which I ply my trade, the very context within which I work, the material of my profession, at its heart, defies evidence. It is, as I said, a fiction. It is a dream. What fact can capture the religious event? What scientific method can empirically measure meaning? What proof can we touch that there is anything beyond machine here? What test is explicit enough to convince me of god or art? There is none. It is all fiction and figment, experience ordered and recast in the storybook of memory. And then, who better to speak of it than a charlatan?

Fiction and figment. Our most basic response to the knowledge that we are alive and that we will someday not be alive… is a fiction. God is a fiction. The big bang is a fiction. History is a fiction. Memory is a fiction. How we relate to one another is a fiction. In fact, in nearly every way, the you that you know – is a fiction. Reality as we understand it and experience it – which does in fact stand as other than or in addition too or sometimes even in contrast with material, chemical fact Ð reality as we understand and experience it is a fiction.

David J. Linden, professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University has written that our brain, “responds to only one particular slice of possible sensory space. Our brains then process this sensory stream to extract certain kinds of information, ignore other kinds of information, and then bind the whole thing together into an ongoing story that is understandable and useful.” To which I might add, “we hope.” We hope it is useful.

Because what is NOT at stake is whether or not it is story or whether or not I am a charlatan or religion is a fiction. That is not at stake at all. It may, I hope, have sounded shocking at first. But shock is a mere parlor trick, a rhetorical slight of hand we charlatan’s use to advance the rubes from A to D without then having to bother with the boring details of B and C.

No, fiction is our reality. So fiction is therefore primary and of the highest esteem, not the other way around. It is because it addresses fundamental fictions via myth and its intersection with experience and logic, that religion occupies the center square of the great game.

And what is a charlatan, preacher, priest or parishioner if not a poet with both hands sunk deep into the ink of this central fiction? So while it may have sounded like I was wallowing self-loathing by calling myself a charlatan, I was doing anything but. In fact, I was not only calling attention to myself, but then paying myself quite the compliment. And I called it confession. What a strange dream.

And it is beautiful. Fiction is beautiful because it is truth unbound to evidence. That is why, for instance, the Bible or say The Grapes of Wrath, are such beautiful works, precisely because they are not evidence. They are truth, not fact. It does not matter, not to me at any rate, if there ever was a King David, Jim Casey, resurrection, or Holy of Holies. They are as true to me as my own name. They are as true to me as my mother, as true to me as my father, as true to me as water, and the sky above, and the earth on which we stand. They are all fictions. They are a dream. And I, as I mentioned before, am also, and especially up here, a dream.

In fact, I had a dream the other day that was similar to this and most peculiar. Have you ever had a dream where you were talking about a dream you had? It’s a strange thing, because you begin to lose track of what you thought was a dream and what you thought was not a dream. See, in this dream I was preaching. Here. Or it looked like it was me preaching. The dream was in the third person, so to speak. I could see what looked like me, dressed in this suit and tie. But even though I could see a person that looked just like me, the only reason I knew it was a dream was because the person that looked like me was not in the pulpit.

He was walking around up here, away from the pulpit. And I do not leave the pulpit. That would terrify me.

And in the dream the preacher was confessing about his inadequacies and how he felt like an atom bomb when his dreams conflicted. He was barking about fiction being a first thing and primary. “It’s like breathing,” he said, and then he took off his coat because walking and talking had made him warm and because he’d seen other preachers and politicians do it repeatedly and at the same time in their talks and so, he supposed, there must be some magic to it. Then the preacher continued pacing, and talking from note cards about dreams and how God is a dream (and he loosened his tie here because he new the stakes were high if he was wrong). The preacher then tried to explain that we are vulnerable in dreams in ways that our culture discourages in waking life, and how that very discouragement winds up creating a nation of neurotics who are out of touch with their inner conflicts. “Dreams,” he said, “are a venue for healing.”

I then saw the preacher roll up his sleeves and for a moment I wondered if this was going to be one of those dreams where the preacher, who looked, really remarkably like me, was going to wind up preaching in his underwear.

“Don’t worry,” said the preacher, “it’s not one of those dreams.” It was weird that he would say that. But dreams are like that.

And in the dream I could tell the preacher was nervous that maybe he wasn’t getting through, maybe he wasn’t communicating as clearly as he had hoped, maybe he wasn’t speaking to the body, to memory, to dreams themselves. He did not know what to do and he began to sweat. And then, I saw the preacher stop preaching and, he seemed pray. He said, “I don’t know that I’m getting through. What do I do?”

And then, in the way dreams do, there came a voice, from everywhere and nowhere. And the voice said, “It’s in the song.”

Well that didn’t make any sense. But that’s okay because dreams often don’t make sense until you analyze them and I wasn’t analyzing just yet. I mean, what the hell is a pulpit, really. And why can’t I leave it? And the voice came again and said, “The truth is in the song.”

The preacher seemed to get it though because he started to lead the congregation in a song, a round, which they sung twice through, where this section started it and then this section came in and then this section over here and they all started singing ROW ROW ROW YOUR BOAT when he said, “One, two, and..”

No, it’s okay. In the dream, the congregation was confused at first, but then they started singing the round when the preacher, for the second time now, said, “One, two, and…”

Hopefully that was memorable. And germinating. Look, dreams are not argument. In keeping with that, I have eschewed presenting much of an argument today, but instead tried to craft into explicitness what is often implicit and ignored: Life is but a dream. The world is but a stage. And Stanislavsky said, “There are no small roles, only small players.” And Ruykeyser said, “The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” So let’s split those stories and play our lives wholly. Holy.

Stories are dreams reigned and harnessed. We are surrounded by them: day dreams, movies, books, advertisements, comics, history, music, dancing, sporting events, reports on science, memory, you, me, everything is rendered in symbols and metaphor. Our lives. Our positions in a room, where we stand in a conversation, who we are in conversation with, our context, colors, where we work and play and how, all mean something and reveal our needs… if we are brave enough to see them as dreams to be harnessed. Truth to be discovered. Now, to make some argument this morning and to throw a bone out to the scientific minds out there, it is compelling that during REM sleep it looks, more or less, from a recording of brain activity, like the person is awake. And see here, its not that dreams and reality are equivalent. I can fly in some of my dreams. And, as of yet, I can not fly in reality. But the meaning we take, the way we form ourselves, how we interact and achieve some kind of happiness, satisfaction and quality of living – the poetics, the fictions are true in similar ways.

And so now we are in the deep end of metaphor. Having stripped reality of its pretense to not pretending, we are left with only metaphor. We are left in a world where meaning is relative, a world drowned in deep symbols. And we can breathe under water, when water is like that. It is here where the speculative art of interpretation can help us live a life more full. It is in dreams where we are forced to confront aspects of our selves we have buried or forgotten. It is in dreams where the genius of our inner artist is allowed free reign and we are reminded, soothed, indulged, lifted and exposed in ways we think are unavailable to us in waking life. But if, as I’ve offered, waking life is a dream, a fiction that can be deconstructed and opened up… well now things get interesting.

I wonder what would happen if we practiced the art of dream interpretation and then applied that art to our waking life. What would happen if, having become somewhat practiced at exploring the metaphors of dream, we turned that metaphorical exploration onto our lives. What institutions, activities, illnesses and relationships that look so necessary as to be taken for granted, suddenly become ripe for personal revelation? What are we really doing? This is what is at stake.

It is a highly, gloriously, subjective mode of being. But it is a way of being that investigates the mode in which we already, subconsciously, bio-chemically live. It is a move away from an oblivious life. Imagine what happens when you bring the subconscious under conscious scrutiny and appreciation or vice versa? We are, after all, myth-makers. We construe our life and the lives of others as beautiful or tragic and that construal IS reality, it is the way the world works. But usually, the myth-making is retrospective. What if we made a practice of making the myth in real-time? What if real-time and dream-time intersect? What depth of meaning and richness of life might we uncover and live into?

How strange and heavy that we are here occupying these pews, this place, and this planet. Wild minds as the cosmos in process, we are the universe as dream. We are bound by its emptiness and lit by its energy, lit so as to see there are ways of seeing, ways of seeing that emptiness and that energy, ways of seeing the sky above, the earth on which we stand, water. Father. Mother. Child. We are the universe dreaming. Let it be a good dream.

For as the bard says, “And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.”

Out of airy nothing. This is how we live. This is life as god’s process, life as art. You are the poet, accidental or otherwise. The question is: what are you saying?